Shopify in 21 Days - Lesson 10: Testing Your Product

CAUTION: Don't fulfill any test orders, because you are charged for any shipping labels that you purchase. If you use an app that automatically fulfills orders, then deactivate it before you create test orders.

Testing Your Product with a Gateway

• Before you send traffic you need to test your product. This is important because you want to be able to experience the buying process to see how it will work from their perspective. If you are drop shipping you may wish to make an actual purchase to test the product and see what the shipping time will be.
• Payment Methods. Their are different ways you can make a test purchase. This one uses a payment gateway. Navigate to payment methods and scroll down to third-party gateways. Click on the one that says bogus gateway. Click to enable the gateway.
• Test Options. There are three options you can choose (1) approved transaction, (2) declined transaction, and (3) gateway failure. 
• Checking out. When you check out, put your test type as the credit card number. You can use any future date as an expiration date and three random numbers for the security code.
• Take note of emails and notifications you receive and look for any changes you may want to make.

Testing Your Product (alternate methods)

• Cash on Delivery Method. In this method, you you go to Payment Methods scroll down to manual payments and enable cash on delivery. In the instructions you can let people know that this is not a real payment method and is only for testing.
• Checkout and Refund.  Make a purchase using the Cash on Delivery method. Afterwards be sure to refund the purchase, just in case Shopify charges a fee on the purchase.
• Shopify Payments Method.  To test purchases using Shopify payments navigate to the Shopify payment tab and click the edit button. Click to "use test mode" and click save. Click the link that says "Learn more about test mode". On this page you'll find the numbers to use to simulate different credit cards and transactions.

Actionable Steps

1. Create a test transaction. Create at least one test transaction using one of the methods above. If your drop shipping you may wish to actually purchase the product to get a better idea of what to expect.
2. View it as a customer. Think about the experience from the customers point of view. What could be changed to create a better experience? Does the process make it easy to create repeat customers? Are you communicating with the customer effectively?
3. Make changes if needed. If you notice weak spots in the process go back and change the followup and notification settings.

Tomorrow's Lesson

Creating and applying discounts.